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Why I hate top-posting
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail and USENET?
There. Now you know what top-posting is.
The Wikipedia article on top-posting is quite dispasstionate if you just want the facts, which includes the following:
The default quote format and cursor placement of many popular e-mail applications, such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail, encourages top-posting. Microsoft has had a significant influence on top-posting by the ubiquity of its software; its e-mail and newsreader software places the cursor at the top by default, and in several cases makes it difficult not to top-post (this is caused by a bug present on most flavours of Microsoft Outlook where the quotation symbols are lost when replying in plain text to a message that was originally sent in HTML/RTF, along with the fact that on the default Microsoft Outlook setup, no quotation symbols are generated at all; this makes it very hard to distinguish between new and quoted text); many users have accepted this as a de facto standard.Dan's mail format site explains a bit more and makes a very balanced attempt to see both sides. Then there is the jargon file entry which is alot briefer and is against top-posting (hurrah!).
For those of us that hate top-posting but find ourselves in a Micro$oft environment from which there is no escape, Dominik Jain has provided a fixed version of Outlook.
Here are some other reasons why I hate top-posting:- Being a Western reader, I read from top to bottom. There, I just had to say it again.
- Being a pleb, I often don't get included in the initial conversation, so I cannot simply interpret the one liner at the top in the context of what has gone before. I never saw the stuff that went before. So I am forced to scroll to the bottom and read it backwards.
- I am used to USENET and email before it was available to the masses. In those days a discussion would involve toing and froing with several people. A quoting convention was used to show who said what and to maintain the flow of conversation. People could see which points were being responded to. With top-posting you can't.
- The Micro$oft influence has made top-posting so common that inline quoting is not often understood and now causes confusion. People are so used to reading email backwards they can no longer read it forwards!
- It shows Micro$oft domination in email. All Micro$oft domination must be fought.
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